#81: The Power of Percentages
In the midst of launching, growing, scaling, it's really natural and easy for us to be a rollercoaster of emotions.
One minute, everything's going great, and the next it's totally different than expected.
In fact, I don't think I've ever been part of a launch or an offer that went exactly the way that we thought it was going to. And as experienced as I am at marketing, I don't think anybody has a crystal ball quite at that level of accuracy.
So in today's podcast episode, I want to share with you the power of percentages.
I’ll be sharing the ones that I personally rely on for guiding my clients and how we stay tuned in to making sure that we hit every single number that we want to as closely as possible.
And if we don't, we know exactly what opportunities to improve as a result.
Check out my new free training on www.yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond.
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Laura (00:00)
In the midst of launching, growing, scaling, it's really natural and easy for us to be a rollercoaster of emotions. One minute, everything's going great, and then it's totally different than expected. In fact, I don't think I've ever been part of a launch or an offer that went exactly the way that we thought it was going to. As experienced as I am at marketing, I don't think anybody has a crystal ball quite at that level of accuracy. So in today's podcast episode, I want to share with you the power of percentages, the ones that I rely on for the clients and how we get back into making sure that we hit every single number that we want to as close as possible, or if we don't, we know exactly what went wrong. Next up in today's Scale Joy podcast.
So I know when you're growing a company and you're launching and you're looking at data, one of the things that can easily happen is that we get into a place where we might be a little bit uncertain as to why something worked, why it didn't work and what can be done about it.
Recently we had a launch where our goals were much higher than the result. It was a little frustrating for our team, especially because it was an experimental launch strategy that we felt very confident in. A few days before the cart closed, it was pretty clear that we needed to lower our expectations which can really affect both the morale of the team, as well as myself.
But when we looked at the actual percentage conversion it is VERY good for our type of offer. Especially during the summer months when people are very distracted, on vacation, getting ready for school, worried about political events in the world, variants and are generally hard to get in touch with once they register for something.
What I have found again and again and again is that when we are feeling like maybe something went one way but we're not 100% sure or why it performed the way it did, I'm always asking, okay, well, what were the percentages around that? And that gives us a lot of clarity, where we can stay out of judgment around something being good or bad or helpful or not helpful and we can get to be a little bit closer to the different benchmarks that are commonly used in determining what is typical of any type of launch. Let’s go through some of those typical percentages now and I’ll explain what I mean.
The type of offer you are selling is going to play a big part in the percentage of people who say yes to your offer. So for example, if you have a membership offer, that is typically a lower conversion percentage, not always, but mostly, than something with a start and end date, because people are a little bit more apprehensive to invest in something that does not have an end date. So in just knowing that, if you're comparing yourself against a course launch, let's say, or a program launch, and you have a membership offer, it's good to keep that in mind. And at the same time, the upside is all the recurring revenue and the stability that comes with membership. So when we are looking at those percentages, this is a really good example of when we can stay pretty level-headed, pretty good, pretty happy with what we're doing, or if we're not happy with what we're doing, we know why and what's broken and where.
At the end of the day, it’s all about knowing the model that suits you best, understanding the pros and cons in selling that type of offer and having an awareness of the typical conversion numbers to back into.
Another example might be that a free opt-in has a higher percentage of conversion than a paid opt-in. So if you're comparing the two and you don't take that into consideration, it can feel really discouraging or encouraging depending on how you're looking at it. So when I look at sales and performance benchmarks, I'm always asking, well, what's the percentage? And if we look at an initial opt-in, something that is typically paid, what I find is that anywhere between 10, 15% is pretty good. Right now, our paid SLO is converting at 13%, and I'm pretty happy with that. Whereas if it's a free opt-in, a challenge or a summit, anything like that, I like to see that number a little bit closer to 50%. So you may feel like, oh my goodness, I only have 100 people signing up for something, but if you look at it, it's a free challenge and it's performing at 40%, then you know that you just need to get more traffic to the page and that actually you're doing pretty good. Looking at overall numbers can be misleading without the context that the percentage and understanding of what’s typical can bring.
On the backend, an order bump conversion might be about 20%, and a backend offer might be somewhere between 3 and 10%. So 5% on a backend higher ticket offer like an OTO, one time offer, could be really, really good. When we look at webinar registration pages, again, minimum around 20%, but target average is about 30. It's awesome if you have 40 or 50%. As a marketing strategist, I always like to be performing above benchmark, but it's not necessarily something that I'm discouraged by if it's around average. The truth is, if we know what to shoot for, that’s the first step in getting there! Knowing your percentages and what is standard for that offer or conversion event allows you to understand the gap and piece by piece, close it.
One of the things most people don't understand about evergreen offers, offers that are fully automated, is that they have a much lower buy rate. A live event or a live webinar might have an 8% to 10% conversion rate or buy rate. Something that's more automated and has more steps in the funnel might have 1% to 5%, and that's considered really good. So it's really just a matter of pumping traffic through. If you are a high ticket service provider and you sell by phone call, you may need to speak to 10 people in order to convert 2, 3, 5 people. Anywhere between 20 to 50% conversion is considered pretty darn good. So if you've only spoken to a few people and none of them have booked with you, you simply don't have enough data points to make any type of decision at all.
What I find is most people give up before the data is even statistically significant, and this keeps them from being successful. So when it comes to the power of conversions, we look at a bottoms up approach to what we're trying to accomplish. So for example, start with the traffic. What's the ad converting at? What's the click through rate? And then on the page, what's the conversion rate of the page? And then from the page to the next thing you want them to do, whether it be the open rate of the emails or the click through rates of the emails, all of that just gives us a pattern. It gives us a hint at the science experiment, the constant guessing, and a hypothesis that's involved with a marketing campaign. And particularly for direct response, there's a lot of other factors that can determine whether or not those percentages are going to be high or on the lower side, some of which might be not in your control. Some of it might be out of your control, like a news cycle.
But knowing that gap of where you are and where you want to be will, of course, dictate the strategy behind the steps you take to get there. So whether it’s launching an evergreen funnel or moving leads to a sales call, you feel good about it’s impact on closing that percentage gap.
And if we compare it against benchmark, what we'll find is actually the majority of people don't say yes to us at any stage in the marketing funnel. Most people, nine out of 10 people will say, "No thank you." And in the marketing percentage world, that's considered awesome. And when you know that, as a marketing strategist, you start becoming very encouraged. It's really typically just a matter of traffic. It's just pumping enough traffic through whatever it is that you're trying to do in order to make a reasonable conclusion. And no matter if you have a high ticket offer that's very low volume and you only speak to maybe five or 10 people a month, looking at those patterns over the course of the month to see what could be done to increase those percentages is key.Could my close rate be stronger? Do I want to have more qualifiers in place? Am I happy with the amount of leads I'm getting? Do I need to increase my lead flow?
If you have any type of automated funnel, if you have any type of lead magnet, if you have any type of email sequence that you expect to convert, it’s key to remember that you’re not comparing it against what someone else is doing blindly, which could be totally different than what would be typical for what you’re doing with your offer.
With the power of percentages, there are a few things I see that consistently tip the scale.
It might be that your offer at the current time is exactly what people need to hear in the world. It's encouraging to them. It gives them hope. It excites them. It's congruent with the messages that people are wanting most. Or is your offer not very timely? Did you used to maybe sell a work from home opportunity and now all people want to do is get out of the house? So a lot of times too, that'll affect your percentages.
The other thing that affects your percentages is your brand presence in the marketplace. If you have great branding, if you have other organic strategies like podcasting or you're running traffic to brand building videos or static posts, or if you have a great organic following, your conversions are going to be much, much stronger than the average person. This is where branding and direct response marketing collide into being able to create a really powerful marketing mix for your company. The more that people hear of you, the more they know, like and trust you. The more that it's not the first time that they've seen the offer, the more likely you are to be on the higher end of the different benchmarks that tend to be available.
When working with a marketing strategist like me, I can give you a pretty good indication of what's going to be good or not good, and also give you encouragement that whatever you're working on right now probably just needs a little bit more time and a little bit more testing in order to get to where you want to be. There's absolute shortcuts, and the shortcuts tend to be in just stronger messaging, stronger hooks, stronger brands. Those in general convert a lot faster, where you have marketplace authority, you have credibility, and you've built up a really, really strong set of marketing messages that are delivered across the different platforms, that are very consistent and cohesive, so that again, when somebody goes to make any type of decision, whether it's to click, register, buy the small thing, buy the bigger thing, upgrade, the more that they trust you, the more likely they are to say yes.
So I hope this is helpful in terms of the types of percentages that I like to follow. I would love to hear from you. Do you rely on those power of percentages? Do you love looking at that data or is it something that you dread? Let me know. Send me a message. I'd love to hear from you. I hope this was encouraging and enlightening on your path of growing an online business.
The Scale with Joy podcast dives into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company to the million dollar mark and beyond. Each week, we follow the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts and leaders - sharing behind the scenes stories of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned-all while building their multi-million dollar empires.